Parallel

by Lauren Miller

  Caitlin and I are sitting on a bed at Emory University Hospital, waiting for the doctor to return with my discharge papers. My nurse gave me a shot of “the good stuff” (her words, not mine) before cleaning the wound—thank God, because I swear they were using steel wool—so the pain has subsided to a subtle ache and my mood has radically improved. My parents left to track down the doctor, who said he’d be back in ten minutes an hour ago. Caitlin and I are sharing a bag of vending machine Chex Mix while she paints my toenails Fire-Engine Red (another gift from Nurse Nina).

  “Who knows,” Caitlin says, her tone dismissive. She focuses on my big toe.

  “Do you have feelings for him?” The question just pops out, catching even me by surprise. Apparently, my thought filter switched off when the painkillers kicked in.

  “What? No. Why would you think that?” She’s believably adamant, but her voice sounds edgy. Like she’s nervous. Her face is angled down, her hair covering her eyes, so I can’t tell if she’s doing that rapid blinking thing she does when she’s lying.

  “Just had a feeling you might,” I say. “If you don’t, you don’t.”

  “I don’t,” she says.

  “But if you did—”

  She looks up at me. “I don’t.” The look on her face tells me she means it.

  “Right. Of course you don’t.” I say this convincingly, but I am not convinced. My gut feeling is too powerful, too strong. There’s something between them, even if neither of them will admit it. “But can I just say I think you’d be a really good couple?”

  “Abby. Drop it.”

  Just then, the door opens and my parents reappear with the doctor, a perky little Argentinean man with giant hands.

  “I guess I’ll take off,” Caitlin says, screwing the cap back onto the bottle of nail polish.

  “Thanks for being here.” I squeeze her hand. Caitlin’s calm kept me calm. It always does.

  As soon as she’s gone, the doctor starts in on his spiel. I’m only half listening. My eyelids are beginning to droop. I could probably fall asleep right here, while he’s talking. I will him to finish his speech.

  “. . . immobilized for at least four weeks. No running or strenuous activity for at least eight—”

  “Eight weeks?” I interrupt the man midsentence. “I can’t run for eight weeks? But I only have eight stitches. And it doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

  The doctor chuckles like I’ve just made a joke. I give him a death stare. His brow furrows.

  “Honey, it doesn’t hurt because they gave you a morphine shot,” my mom says gently. Ugh. Sometimes I loathe the soothing voice. My dagger eye shuts her up.

  “Four nails went through your foot,” the doctor says, his voice almost as patronizing as the look he’s giving me. Yes, thank you, jackass, I’m aware of that. “You chipped two bones. You’re lucky they didn’t shatter.”

  “What about cross-country?” I direct the question at my dad, the only person in the room who’s not irritating me right now. “Eight weeks is the whole season.” My voice sounds strained. Panicky.

  “Ab—,” he begins. I don’t let him finish.

  “I’m the captain of the team! There’s no way Coach P will let me keep the title if I’m not competing.”

  “It sucks,” Dad says simply. “I get that. We all do. But it is what it is.” And with that bit of banality, he takes the air right out of my rage balloon.

  “So,” the doctor says, smiling like we’re at the circus. “Pink gauze or white?”

  I’m quiet on the drive home. Annoyed at myself, annoyed at Josh for not making me put my shoes on, annoyed at the construction worker who left nails on that step. Most annoyed at the universe for allowing a momentary lapse in judgment to have such a massive effect. Not running with the team this season means I now have only one extracurricular for my college applications: EIC of the Oracle. Without cross-country as a counterweight, I’ll seem tunnel-visioned and one-dimensional, which aren’t exactly qualities admissions officers look for. The worst part is, I have no backup plan. I’m on crutches for three weeks, so every other sport is out, and it’s not like I can just join some random club three weeks into the semester. I mean, I’m sure I can, but it’ll seem like I’m just doing it for my college applications. Which I am, but it’s not supposed to look that way.

  My dad was right. This sucks.

  To their credit, my parents leave me alone. They know me well enough to know that I am not in the mood to hear how it could have been worse or why having four nail-sized holes in my foot isn’t the end of the world. No doubt they’ll lay it on thick tomorrow, but tonight they’re kind enough to hold off. I spend the duration of the car ride glowering at the cocoon of pink gauze on my foot and wishing I could rewind my life.

  As we’re pulling into the driveway, my phone rings. JOSH—CELL.

  “You answered,” he says when I pick up. “I figured I’d get your voicemail. Are you still at the hospital?”

  “Nope. Just pulled into my driveway.”

  “What’s the damage?”

  “Eight stitches. Crutches for three weeks. No cross-country for the rest of the season.” I say this mechanically, as if the diagnosis belongs to someone else.

  “Oh, no. Really? You’re out for the whole season?”

  The sympathy in his voice pushes me over the edge. Blinking back tears, all I can do is nod.

  “Abby?”

  I cough. I read somewhere that coughing physically prevents you from crying. Is once enough, or do you have to keep doing it? I don’t want to take any chances, so I cough a few more times for good measure. My mom glances back at me, eyebrows raised. I wave her away.

  “Are you okay?” Josh asks.

  “Fine,” I say, relieved that the coughing seems to have done the trick. “Bummed. But fine. I’ll get over it.” As untrue as this may be, it sounds good. “Well, I guess I should probably go,” I tell him. “My parents are sitting in the car, waiting to help me into the house since we don’t have my crutches yet.”

  “Okay, well . . . I’m really sorry about tonight. I feel like it’s my fault. I never should’ve let—I just should’ve known better.” He sounds annoyed. I can’t tell whether it’s with me or himself.

  “Next time we’ll stay indoors,” I say.

  Josh is quiet on the end of the line. No suggestion for when “next time” might be. No offer to stop by tomorrow to check on me. Just an awkward two seconds while I absorb the fact that any interest Astronomy Boy had in me evaporated along with my cross-country career.

  “I should go,” I tell him. My voice sounds flat. My parents look at each other, no doubt noticing my abrupt change in tone.

  “See you Monday?” he says.

  “Yep,” I say dully and hang up on him.

  “Everything okay?” Mom asks.

  “You mean other than the fact that I spent the last three years busting my butt to be captain, only to have it snatched away by a stupid nail?”

  “Technically it was four nails,” my dad points out.

  I glare at him. “Thank you. Can we go inside now?”

  Dad sighs. “Sure.” He gets out of the car and opens the back door.

  “I know you’re upset,” my mom says sympathetically. “But things’ll look better in the morning. They always do.”

  Yeah. Except when they don’t.

  5

  HERE

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 27, 2009

  (two weeks and four days later)

  Daylight is pressing against my eyelids, but I resist the urge to open them. Not yet. Not until—

  BEEEEP. BEEEEP. BEEEEP. BEEEEP.

  Like clockwork: the campus garbage truck, backing up to the bins on the other side of the courtyard wall. The sound I wait for every morning. I won’t open my eyes until I hear it.

  It’s a ritual that serves no purpose. Just my way of preserving the illusion that I am exactly where I was the night before. As long as my eyes are closed, I can assume that reality hasn’t
changed again. And once I hear the garbage truck’s now-familiar beep, I know for certain that it hasn’t. I haven’t thought through what would happen if I were to wake up somewhere other than this room. How long would I keep my eyes shut, waiting for that sound?

  Let’s hope I never have to find out.

  I open one eye and look around. The photograph Marissa gave me for my birthday is on the wall. The jacket I wore last night is slung over my desk chair. There is a tiny mound of crust crumbs on my floor. In other words, my room looks exactly the way it did five hours ago when I fell into a food coma after inhaling three slices of double pepperoni on my walk home from Toad’s, the most popular place for Yalies to drink, dance, and make bad decisions. (None for me so far—I forced myself to write CAN’T TONIGHT! in response to Michael’s 11:57 p.m. text request that I “stop by” his house on my way home. When does BE RIGHT THERE become an acceptable response to a booty call from a guy who hasn’t taken you on a real date yet? Doesn’t the fact that this guy could wake up tomorrow with no clue who you are warrant some bending of the hookup rules?)

  Continuing my morning ritual, I retrieve my phone from under my pillow and begin scrolling through my recent photos. I’ve taken dozens since I got here, logging every potentially erasable experience. These photos are my security blanket. As long as they look the way I remember them, I know that things haven’t changed too dramatically overnight. I breeze through them quickly today, skipping over one of a group of girls in blue tank tops that Caitlin must’ve taken, eager to get to the one I care most about: the photo I took of Michael on my birthday. When I see it, I relax, satisfied that everything is the way it’s been for the past two and a half weeks. At first it seemed silly to hope that reality wouldn’t change again, but each day, the possibility gets a little easier to imagine, and my life in L.A. gets a little more distant, like something that happened a long time ago, or in a dream.

  As of this morning, I have nineteen days’ worth of alternate memories. As Caitlin predicted, I seem to be getting my parallel’s memories as she lives them, which means that right now, I have everything up to September 26, 2008. I’ve been trying to write down my new memories as they come, but the task is harder than you’d think. It’s not like the new stuff is top of mind when I wake up, so remembering takes effort. And even then, I can’t always tell what came from the parallel world. Sometimes a detail will stand out, but most of the time, my parallel’s memories just blend in with my own, making it difficult to tell them apart. Did I bring my lunch that Wednesday or buy it? Did I wear boots that Friday or my red ballet flats? Does it matter? The one notable difference between my real memories and the new ones is how sterile the new ones are. I remember things my parallel has done as though I did them, but I have no sense of how she felt in the moment. That’s how I can tell which memories don’t belong to me—I don’t feel anything when I replay them in my head.

  The journalist in me is still skeptical that entanglement is the explanation for all this, but Caitlin has gone from pretty sure to totally convinced. She’s now read every book, magazine article, and academic paper on the subject and says she no longer has any doubts. It’s hard to argue with her, and I’m not sure I want to anyway. What she’s proposing is hard to wrap my head around, but it makes my life make sense, and right now, that’s reason enough to accept it.

  If our world is entangled, it looks like I’m the only person who remembers the way things were before. Every day I scour the internet for evidence that there are others like me out there, but I have yet to find any. Plenty of people have written about the collision—“the earthquake that wasn’t an earthquake”—and theories about its significance abound, but few appear willing to accept Dr. Mann’s explanation, and no one has drawn a connection between the tremor on September 8, 2008, and the global headache on September 9, 2009 (though people have lots to say about each). Apparently, millions of people woke up on my birthday with pain at the base of their skulls. Even the conspiracy theorists haven’t contemplated that their memories may have been wiped out and replaced by the memories of their parallel selves. Dr. Mann has his theories—and after our visit to see him, surely his suspicions—but no real evidence. Not so far, anyway. Caitlin wants to tell him about me, but I’m still not sure we can trust him. What better way to restore his damaged reputation than to go public with my story? I’m all for scientific progress, but there’s no way I’m becoming some physicist’s lab specimen. Or ending up in a padded room somewhere.

  Light is streaming in through the crack between my curtains, which is surprising because it was supposed to rain today. I tug at the panel closest to me, pulling it to one side. The sky is bright blue, dotted with puffy cotton-ball clouds. I guess the weatherman was wrong.

  I slide the curtains closed and snuggle down under my sheets. I’m supposed to meet Caitlin and Tyler for brunch at Commons before his flight back to Michigan (all the talk of impermanent realities convinced Caitlin to let him come visit), but that’s not until ten, giving me at least another hour of sleep. The delicious, semiconscious, edge-of-wonderland kind of sleep, where I’m awake enough to control my dreams but asleep enough to forget that I’m doing it.

  “Abby?” I peer out from under my covers. Marissa is at my doorway, dressed in yoga gear and holding a yoga mat. “It’s quarter till. Aren’t you going to be late?”

  Late? Late for what?

  It is at this moment that I realize the previously overlooked flaw in my morning ritual. Just because the events I’ve photographed haven’t been overwritten doesn’t mean my reality hasn’t changed in other, undocumented ways.

  I feign sleepy confusion. “Wait, what day is it?” Fingers crossed that whatever I’m late for isn’t an everyday thing.

  Marissa looks at me like I’m crazy. “It’s Sunday. Don’t you have to be at the boathouse at eight?”

  The boathouse?

  “Oh, right . . . Yeah. Thanks for reminding me! I’d better get up.” I flash a smile and throw off the covers.

  “Okay, well, I guess I’ll see you later, then,” she says, still eyeing me. “I have Bikram at eight, then I’ll probably head to the library for a couple hours.” She makes a face. “I have two chapters of Ulysses to finish before tomorrow.”

  I nod distractedly. “Good luck with that.” I’m anxious for her to leave so I can call Caitlin. As soon as the door clicks shut, I lunge for my phone.

  My call goes straight to voicemail. I start talking before the beep.

  “Why is your phone off?!? When your best friend is suffering from some freaky astrophysical phenomenon—is astrophysical even a word?—you’re supposed to keep your phone on. At all times. Who else can tell me why I’m supposed to be at the boathouse at eight in the freaking morning on a Sunday? I didn’t even know Yale had a boathouse. Call me as soon as you get this.”

  I toss my phone on the bed and sit down in front of my computer. According to the Yale website, Gilder Boathouse is in Derby, nearly ten miles from campus.

  I contemplate bagging the whole thing, but know that I can’t. Not if I’m committed to keeping up the appearance of normalcy. What if it’s something important? What if it’s class-related? What if I’m writing a story on the sailing team for the YDN and I’m supposed to meet someone for an interview? Usually freshmen have to go through a semester-long “heeling” process before they can become full-fledged reporters for the Yale Daily News, but since I—okay, my parallel—wrote more than half of the articles published in the Oracle last year, I got to skip that step and last week became the YDN’s newest staff reporter, an opportunity I’m not about to screw up.

  Ooh. Could that be it? Could my parallel self have done something to earn me a spot on the coveted sports beat? That would rock. I need to learn how to cover sports. Plus, it’d give me an excuse to go to Michael’s lacrosse games without feeling like a stalker.

  Newly motivated, I fly out of my chair and start getting dressed. Since I’m going to a boathouse, I opt for sporty layers, figuri
ng that if I’m underdressed, I’ll just pretend I’m on my way to the gym. As I’m lacing up my running shoes, I realize with a start that these aren’t, in fact, my running shoes. Yes, they’re running shoes, and yes, they were in my closet, but they’re not mine. Mine are old and worn in, practically falling apart from use. These fit, but they’re a different brand, and they look like they’ve barely been worn. Where is my old pair? I glance at the clock on my computer screen: 7:51. Boathouse now, shoe mystery later.

  Outside, the sun is blindingly bright, making me wish I’d brought my sunglasses. I squint at my campus map, trying to pinpoint the closest shuttle stop. There’s a little blue S on the corner of College and Elm, two blocks from where I’m standing.

  Jogging down the sidewalk, I rack my brain for my newest memory. If something has changed today in our world, then that means Parallel Abby must have done something yesterday in her world to cause it. Since her yesterday is a year behind mine in time, I need to remember what happened on September 26, 2008.

  A blue-and-white school bus turns from High Street onto Elm. I pick up my pace to catch it and am surprised at how quickly I’m winded from the effort.

  There are a handful of people on the bus, scattered among the first few rows. I go all the way to the back. Sliding down until only my chest is upright, I pull my knees up and press them against the scratched brown leather seat in front of me, the way I used to do in elementary school. Cell phone balanced carefully on my stomach in case Caitlin calls back, I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to summon the memories I need. The memories that will make this all make sense.

  Think, Abby. September 26, 2008. It would have been a Friday. That makes it easier. I only have three Friday memories so far, so this one would have to be—

  My phone rings. Thank God. I slide farther down in my seat, out of view.

  “Please don’t tell me I joined the sailing team,” I say, answering.

  “You didn’t join the sailing team.” I can hear Caitlin smiling.

  “Then why am I supposed to be at a boathouse at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning?”